Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

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Jeff Atwood

The Prototype Pitfall

Tim Weaver, channelling Robert Glass [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321117425/codihorr-20], on the five laws of prototypes [http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/tim.weaver/archive/2004/09/01/23928.aspx]: 1. The answer to any prototype / feasibility question is always yes 2. Whatever poor coding practices you use

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Rube Goldberg Software Devices

Rube Goldberg software design is the meme of the month, after being parodied by Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman in this brilliant short video [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7192107253321481602&q=scott+and+rory], and oddly enough, also currently appearing in Microsoft advertisements: Now compare that to an

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Better Presentations through Practice

Like most developers, I don't get a lot of experience giving presentations. The golden rule is: practice, practice, and more practice. Then incorporate the feedback from those practice sessions into your presentation. Of course, it helps to perform practice sessions in front of people who have seen a

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Parsing: Beyond Regex

I've blogged ad nauseam about how much I love Regular Expressions, but even the mighty regular expression has limits. As noted in Daniel Cazzulini's blog: A full-blown programming language cannot be parsed with regular expressions. But given the limited number of programming languages (successful ones, let&

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Searching all Craigslist.org Cities

If you've ever used Craigslist.org-- a fantastic and rather odd resource-- you may have noticed that it's heavily biased towards per-city searches. This is a pain if you want to do a national search across all cities that Craigslist.org operates sites for. A while

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What's on your keychain?

It's a geek rite of passage: what's on your keychain? Here's mine: * 512mb Sandisk Cruzer USB 2.0 thumbdrive * Leatherman Squirt S4 * Arc AAA LED flashlight I carried a Leatherman Micra for years, but I forgot to ditch it prior to a business trip

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John Carmack on Java, Phones, and Gaming

John Carmack, the primary developer of Doom and Quake at id Software, posted some great comments [http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent%20Updates] on his recent experiments with cellphone game development in Java. My favorite? > there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6

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Building Mht Files from URLs revisited

I finally finished updating my Convert any URL to a MHTML archive using native .NET code CodeProject article. It's based on RFC standard 2557, aka Multipart MIME Message (MHTML web archive). You may also know it as that crazy File, Save As, "Web Archive, Single File"

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On Necessity

When working with users, I am frequently reminded of this conversation in David O. Russell's movie Three Kings [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120188/]: > GATES What is the most important thing in life? TROY What are you talking about? GATES What's the most important thing?

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Are You There, God? It's Me, Microsoft.

Although you eventually outgrow them, any developer worth his or her salt bears the scars of a thousand tiny religious wars. It's an occupational hazard, as Steve McConnell notes in Thou Shalt Rend Software and Religon Asunder [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735619670/codihorr-20]: > Religion

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Trees, TreeViews, and UI

I somehow doubt this is what Joyce Kilmer was thinking of when he wrote the poem Trees [http://www.bartleby.com/104/119.html]: > I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. It's unfortunate that the treeview is one of the standard

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If You Like Regular Expressions So Much, Why Don't You Marry Them?

All right... I will! [http://www.x-entertainment.com/messages/509.html] I'm continually amazed how useful regular expressions are in my daily coding. I'm still working on the MhtBuilder refactoring, and I needed a function to convert all URLs in a page of HTML from relative

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